This job might no longer be available.

Lead Backend Engineer

GSN Games is looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to join our fabulous team in the UK, Spain or Ukraine!

About GSN’s Super Casual Studio:
It’s an exciting time in Super Casual Studio ! We’re working on our next big game and we’re looking for a Lead Engineer to help us take our vision forward!

We believe that play matters and that’s why we are creating the next genre-leading games that are fun, engaging and rewarding. Joining GSN Games will give you a platform to work on exciting new games while working alongside the best people in the business!

The main bulk of the team is located in London. but we have people all working from all over including; US, UK, Spain, Ukraine.

What You’ll Do:
As a Lead Engineer, you will be responsible for the design, implementation and maintenance of game systems on our (brand new) server stack. You will work closely with the Tech Director, Game Designers, Product Managers and Client Engineers to create fast, robust and, most importantly, fun features and systems for our passionate players.

The Lead of the team will focus largely on bringing technical experience to an existing engineering team, they will help define and scope goals and KPIs for the backend but most importantly will actively design and develop new features for our game. The ideal candidate will be someone who wants to be coding the solutions with the team.

You will actively suggest and implement well thought-out solutions to better the development process and improve game systems. You will manage yours and your team's schedule and help improve the pace of work in an agile project management environment. In this role, you will get the opportunity to utilise your engineering skills and develop systems that operate under large loads to bring joy to our players. Your day to day may include:

• Leading game and system development on the server
• Identify and solve problems in the software
• Whiteboarding, design and presentation of new technical ideas and solutions to the team
• Balance between practical and ideal engineering practices to achieve goals effectively
• Design and create extensible systems that can be reused across all of our games
• Create tools for developers to use to develop and maintain games
• Analyze server performance, and optimize the system for higher loads
• Work together with other engineers to solve hard problems
• Investigate problems with the live game and fix them on the fly
• Contribute to the design of the games by providing meaningful insights
• Help explain to non-technical stakeholders how and why infrastructure features will add value to the product
• Hold regular 1:1s and team meetings to define and feedback into the product roadmap
• Actively advocate for your team's interests and ensure their needs are being addressed

Our Tech Stack

• Our services are largely written in Kotlin, some are written in Java
• Our services are hosted entirely on AWS
• Our services are deployed in Kubernetes containers
• We use Kafka for handling high volume social features, think social media and you’re on the right track
• We use a mix of AWS pipelines and Jenkins to do our server deployments
• We aim to have a LOT of players so knowledge or experience with scalable server solutions helps
• We use Git for our version control

About You:
You are an experienced developer with a passion for technology and innovation. You’ll be energetic, enthusiastic and collaborative in your approach to all things. You have a passion to learn new concepts and want to improve things you see that don’t work. You are comfortable advocating for best practice and explaining cost benefits to any discipline.

• Experience with our tech stack. In particular, Kube, Kafka and Mongo
• Experience with building solutions in AWS
• Experience and deep knowledge of scalable server solutions
• Experience with technical operations to support live games, deployment, and development (System operations, Development operations, Build systems)
• Experience releasing at least one high volume product, 1mill+ DAU with high CCU
• Ability to design and implement complex backend systems at scale
• Practical software architecture skill
• Experience with Agile/Scrum managed project
• Ability to understand and action game specs into a viable technical solution
• Thorough understanding of the tradeoff of system design and implementation
• Experience with real-time server-side programming is a plus